We took the existing content from the site and with the help of her and her staff developed a better content strategy for the information on her site. Our web design for the new site aimed to bring out the warm and inviting atmosphere that you get when you walk into their office. This helped maintain the consistency and expectations of viewers to the site and in the door customers.

We used wordpress as the content management system for ease of use and staff training. The package we offered came with a customized video tutorial that they can use as a reference tool for training new staff on how to update the site as well.

We were very pleased to work with such a great client and look forward to working with them in the future!

Local businesses must know

It is very important for every local business to have a good web presence, but they don't all include spending money; some are just require your time.

There is actually many things you can do to help your business get found online that are inexpensive or completely free (well, including the time it takes you to complete them).

We will cover many of the things that any local businesses can do that are low-cost, free, and even some paid options that will boost your online presence. One thing that I would like to point out is that many of the things listed below work best when put together with an overall web marketing strategy. If you would like some help, feel free to contact us.

We’re going to break these up into some basic categories. “Web Design and SEO, Online Directory Management and Submission, Social Media, Online Advertising, and some free online tools to help you along the way”.

Web Design and SEO

So there are many things to consider about your website. There are some key components to any website that will determine how well your site is found online and also it’s effectiveness.

• Smart and Effective Content Strategy
• Search Engine Optimization
• An Effective User-Centered Design
• How Many Other Websites Link to Yours
• Does your website update all the major search engines when updated
• Is Your website ready for mobile devices?

A smart content strategy for your website is essential to be an influential part of any search engine’s top results. Google for instance has been updating it’s search algorithms time and time again trying to bring the most relevant, local, and quality results to the people who search on their site. So having content that specifically speaks about your geographic area (Red Wing, MN or Hastings, MN), well written,  and focused on trends and topics in your industry will help search engines see the information/content on your website as valuable to the people searching.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization deals mainly with the way your website is built and coded. There are some very specific things that can be implemented in your code that can help your website be better optimized for the search engines. An SEO consultation with an expert is a must for every business that wants their website to show up in the search engines. They can help you determine what websites should you target to get backlinks to your site, and how you can implement a feature that updates all major search engines when you add something new to your website content.

Web design has changed in many ways over the years and websites that are designed intelligently in today’s world keep the viewer or user’s experience while on the website as the most important aspect of the design. This includes things like: information is easy to find on your site, clear calls to action are highlighted for ease of use, and effectively used color scheme and professional graphics”.

With such a large number of people using their mobile devices for mobile web browsing, it is starting to become an essential aspect of web design to have a mobile version of your website ready.

Online Directory Management and Submission

There are an absolute ton of websites out there that claim to be the best directory to search for local businesses and local information, but there are a handful that really do help your odds of being found online. One of the other key benefits to doing this, is that you are better able to manage your online reputation and ensure consistency across many sites that contain information about your business. This ensures that when a potential customer does find you online, that they are given accurate and up-to-date information. Below are a list of websites that often come up in the search engines when viewers are looking for information about your business. I’ve also included links to the login or account creation pages as well.

Social Media

There are a lot of mis-conceptions about social media out there among local businesses owners. Some think it is a free for of advertising, while others think that it is a good way to attract new customers. To be truthful, neither are really accurate, yes while social media accounts are free a successful social media campaign takes a good amount of time. How much would you charge for an hourly wage? Furthermore, social media really doesn’t help you reach potential customers that are new to your business.

Find your strategy

Sit down and figure out exactly what you would like to accomplish with social media and make sure social media is the best channel for that goal.

That being said there are some really valuable things that can be attained through use of social media. One of the most effective things that local businesses can be accomplish through social media is customer relationship management. Once you’ve got a customer that likes you, how do you get them to keep coming back? Well, for starters you keep in contact with them and provide them information that they are interested in. The very nature of social media is that it is social, you wouldn’t walk into a cocktail party and yell “15% off window treatments across the street”, neither should you jump into your customers social atmosphere and start pitching your product or service.

Online Advertising

One of the quickest ways to be found online is to find good places to advertise online. This allows you to get your message out right away in front of an audience that is already there. There are a ton of different ways to advertise online, but the most common are Online Display Advertising (banners, video, expanding ads), Paid Search Results Advertising, and Email Marketing are among the top. With any of the above methods, you will want to think about who your audience is, age, gender, geographic location. Because all effective forms of online advertising allow you the ability to target a very specific audience. So being very precise in your audience will help to ensure the success of your campaign.

Here is a video Roger created for the RiverTown Newspaper Group in Red Wing,MN showcasing their advertising opportunities:

While online display advertising can be more expensive, you usually find that websites such as news organizations are trusted by their viewers and that will benefit your advertising campaign. A good and reputable website will charge anywhere from $15-$25 CPM (cost per thousand) for an advertising campaign.

Paid Search Results also know as Search Engine Marketing can be an effective way to reach an audience with a smaller budget usually sold on CPC (cost per click) basis allow you to set a maximum price you are willing to pay per click.The most commonly used services are Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. Make sure you contact someone with experience in creating CPC campaigns for some advice, because they can be extremely complicated to do correctly.

Email marketing is a great way to reach new customers or keep in touch with those who have expressed interest in your business. Look for the resource below MailChimp to see if Email Marketing is for you.

Free Online Tools To Help You

Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is a free website measurement tool that can help you determine how may people are visiting your site, what pages they look at while on your site, where they are located, and many many more features. This is a must for any business who is serious about being online, you have to be able to measure your success along the way. You will most likely need someone with web development experience to help you implement this.

MailChimp:

Email Marketing professionals pretty much describes MailChimp. You can sign up for a free account and send out a limited number of emails each month. A great way to get your feet wet with email marketing or even starting a company newsletter.

Free Software for your computer:

We created a resource page to list a handful of valuable and completely free resources for local businesses. They range anywhere from Free Office Suite software to anti-virus software. Many goodies, and actually is a great page to bookmark.

Customer Feedback For Your Website:

Uservoice.com is a great way to ask the visitors to your website if there is anything they would like to see. People leave comments, suggestions, complaints, anything that they feel they need to contribute. If used correctly, these tools can help you greatly improve the experience your potential customers have on your website by taking their feedback and making improvements.

Google Docs:

Click Here for a complete walk through on how Google Docs can be used a free set of programs to help benefit your business as well.

Our client asked us to build the site in such a way that it was very un-intimidating, so as not to turn away any potential customers. The very idea of carrying a loaded weapon is intimidating to some, so the aim of the website’s design was to offer a professional looking site that didn’t focus on imagery of weapons. The main colors in the web design (blue and orange) were chosen for a couple important reasons. As many designers know, the decisions of color in your design affect user perception of your brand. With this in mind Blue was chosen as the strongest element to portray calmness, stability, trust, and professionalism, while the accent of orange allowed for the ability to pull the website visitors attention to key components of the site.

Before we closed out the project, in all we helped Chandler’s Conceal and Carry Instruction with a web design, new logo design, and a new business card design to ensure consistency of brand throughout all the different collateral.

Chris Chandler, our client, was absolutely great to work with. He was very open to suggestion and willing to offer valuable input when needed. These kinds of things can make a project an absolute pleasure to work on. Chris is very good at what he does, if anyone is looking for a professional and knowledgeable Conceal and Carry Instructor, CLICK HERE and contact Chris.

• You can access them from any computer anywhere in the world
• You can grant access to to the documents to a selected group of people by sharing it out to them
• Your documents can be downloaded and saved to your computer in common file formats (.pdf, .xls, etc)
• You don’t have to worry about expensive software upgrades
• You can upload all your existing documents, so that you can access them from anywhere

Google offers a list of all the benefits and things you can do in Google Docs:

Here’s what you can do in your Documents List:

• Create Google documents, spreadsheets, other file types, and collections.
• Upload (from your computer, if you’d like), manage, and store files and folders.
• Share Google Docs, files, and collections.
• Preview your docs and files before you open or share them.
• View images and videos that you’ve uploaded to your Documents List.
• Search for items by name, type, and visibility setting.

Here’s what you can do with documents:

• Convert most file types to Google Docs format.
• Add flair and format your documents, with options such as paint format, margins, spacing, and fonts.
• Invite other people to collaborate on a doc with you, giving them edit, comment or view access.
• Collaborate online in real time and chat with other collaborators.
• View your documents’ revision history and roll back to any version.
• Download Google Docs to your desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF, HTML or zip files.
• Translate a document to a different language.
• Email your documents to other people as attachments.

To learn more about Google documents, check out the Google documents getting started guide.

Here’s what you can do with spreadsheets:

• Import and convert .xls, .csv, .txt and .ods formatted data.
• Export .xls, .csv, .txt and .ods formatted data and PDF and HTML files.
• Use formatting and formula editing so you can calculate results and make your data look the way you’d like.
• Chat in real time with others who are editing your spreadsheet.
• Create charts and gadgets.
• Embed a spreadsheet, or individual sheets of your spreadsheet, in your blog or website.

For more information about Google spreadsheets, check out the Google spreadsheets getting started guide.

Here’s what you can do with presentations:

• Share and edit presentations with your friends and coworkers.
• Import and convert existing presentations in .pptx and .pps file types.
• Download your presentations as a PDF, a PPT, or a .txt file.
• Insert images and videos, and format your slides.
• Allow real-time viewing of presentations, online, from separate remote locations.
• Publish and embed your presentations in a website, allowing access to a wide audience.

For more information about Google presentations, check out the Google presentations getting started guide

Here’s what you can do with drawings:

• Share and edit drawings with your friends and coworkers.
• Download your presentations as a PNG, JPEG, SVG, or PDF file.
• Insert images, shapes, and lines, and format them to fit your preferences.
• Real-time collaboration with other people, no matter where they are.
• Insert a drawing into a document, spreadsheet, or presentation.

For more information about Google drawings, check out the Google drawings getting started guide

• A Content Management System that allowed their staff to update the new website without much computer experience.
• A password protected set of pages that were accessible only to parents.
• The ability to have parents register for access and be approved by an administrator before being able to view private pages.
• A special section of password protected pages for staff use.

With these features in mind we built the website on the world class Content Management System WordPress.  The website design aspect of this project was exciting to work on, as they really were looking for an earthy theme that showed off the amazing outdoors activities they offer their students. So we worked in some natural elements such as Oak Bark texture as the main background, as well as some grass and soil lining the footer.

We helped them compare hosting accounts and migrated them to a new hosting account with Bluehost.com. They were a great team to work with and we look forward to working with them in the future.

If you would like to stop by the site and receive a freebie, you can get one completely free (no registration) Royalty Free Music track.

We are proud to announce a new website design for the Hastings Area Swim Team in Hastings, MN. A new website presence that helps combine many administrative tasks into one channel. A content management system that allows them to keep a current calendar of events, allow website visitors to receive important updates via email and also take payments for swimmer registration. Hastings, MN has a great swim program and wish all of the swimmers and team members success for the future!

View the website at www.hastswimteam.com

If you are a blogger or website developer, and haven’t used this on your website yet, you can get the Google +1 button code here.

If you haven’t heard of Google +1, check out the video below and be prepared to see it coming to Google search results really soon.

One of the key goals that many  local businesses in smaller communities are looking for, is to simply be online and to have a presence. Keep in mind, I’m generalizing right now,  but many small local businesses haven’t thought out a customer retention management strategy across different social media platforms and conceptualized what their SEO and SEM goals are for their website.

The local business, just wants to be found online, offer information and location details, and possibly sell their products online via an eCommerce storefront. There are very basic needs that need to be met for a majority of the local business aiming to build a website.

In this article I wanted to touch on a couple points in regards to web design for local businesses in small communities. What you as a business owner really need to get your website up and working for you.

1. Content Management  Systems
2. Hosting and domain names
3. The costs a local business can expect to spend on a website
4. And why large web development companies are missing the buck

Content Management Systems

Gone are the days where an experienced web developer is needed to update your website. This was lucrative for web designers and developers in the past, because your common business owner couldn’t often take the time to learn website development and thus needed to go back to their web developers every time they needed a change on their site. Well, now websites should be built with Content Management Systems that offer the client the ability to update their website with very minimal computer skills. For instance this website is ran on the WordPress Content Management System, and if you are able to work in Microsoft Word typing a letter, you already have all the skills you need to update your website. Really. It’s that easy. So ending point here, is that the local business owner should have the ability to not incur expensive and consistent costs associated with the upkeep of their web presence. They can do it themselves or train someone in their office to update the website.

Hosting and domain names

Here are a couple considerations that need to be thought out for a local business owner looking to start a website. What is your domain name going to be? A couple good ideas to keep in mind, is that you want your name and what you do in your domain name if possible, or even the location of your business. For instance: Let’s say I’m a local bakery in Red Wing, MN. The name of my company is “Red Wing Bakery”. The best possible choice would be www.redwingbakery.com, second might be www.redwingbakedgoods.com. A good domain name can be a pivotal point in how your websites performs for your business. Just remember, the domain name should accurately describe your business name and services, and be easy to remember.

As far as hosting goes, most web designers and web developers will refer you to their web hosting company of choice. A hosting company simply rents you space on their web server to place the files for your website. The costs of good, cheap hosting are getting lower every day. I always recommend BlueHost.com to all of my clients that run a website for small to medium sized websites. It is $6.95 a month for unlimited space, unlimited email accounts, and a bunch of other great freebies. When choosing a hosting company, make sure you find one that is established and won’t go out of businesses a year or two down the line, leaving you paying a website developer to migrate your website to a new hosting company.

Click here for a price hosting comparison chart and coupon codes for discounts.

What should a local business spend on a website

Well, that depends of course on what you want your website to do, but generally speaking your basic site, with a content management system, website design, general information, google maps, photo galleries, etc etc, shouldn’t cost more than $1000. In most cases they end up costing right around $750. (keeping in mind the costs for hosting and domain names is about $85/year). An eCommerce website for a local business designed to generate revenue on line would most likely start at about $1500, but keeping in mind that a good eCommerce storefront is a well built machine designed to produce revenue. If you are unsure about the fairness of a recent quote you’ve been given to have a website built for you, drop us line we’ll give you an objective assessment of what your project should cost.

And really why are large web development companies missing the buck

The main reason being, is that when you are working on large enterprise projects, you begin to lose sight of what is really required to satisfy the needs of your everyday local business. Yes, in time these local businesses will grow into finding an effective social media strategy and assessing the analytics data from their website traffic, but for now, they really just need to be online, look professional, and start getting found through the search engines. Most of all, local companies often want to work with someone local. The reason being, is that if something goes wrong or needs to be fixed on their website, they want the comfort of knowing that whomever can help fix it isn’t that far away.

In closing, I hope that all the local businesses here in my town of Red Wing MN and even in my neighbor town of Hastings MN that all of the local business find an affordable, professional, and effective presence on the web. Because in the coming years, how they are found online will greatly influence their ability to maintain a profitable organization. The companies that are online and successful at it, will have the upper hand on their competition.

I was looking for a great way to build into the WordPress CMS (content management system), a reminder for my clients that support is always available. So by a few lines of code, we are able to create a custom dashboard widget inside the WordPress CMS, this simple code trick simply drops our logo and a link to our contact page as a widget on the wordpress dashboard.

To add one of these to your site….

Simply open your functions.php file and add the following code:

 add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'my_custom_dashboard_widgets');
 
    function my_custom_dashboard_widgets() {
    global $wp_meta_boxes;
 
    wp_add_dashboard_widget('custom_help_widget', 'Mind Blossom Creations | Support', 'custom_dashboard_help');
    }
 
    function custom_dashboard_help() {
    echo '
 
If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact us through the contact form on our site.<a href="http://www.mindblossomcreations.com/contact.html">Click here to contact us</a>.
 
<img src="http://www.mindblossomcreations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/cms-mbc-logo.png" alt="" width="200px" /> ';
    }

Remember to change the links and logos, and also add other useful information.

This little code snippet might come in handy for your clients, or when you are simply looking to to create custom dashboard widgets for useful features you always wished you had on your dashboard.

This is how this code appears on the dashboard: